How the Government Manipulates Your Thoughts Online/Paid Gov’t and Corporate Internet Trolls Are Real

Abby Martin talks about journalist Glenn Greenwald's report regarding the intelligence community's use of subversive and manipulative online tactics to destroy the reputations of businesses and individuals.

Their mission has nothing to do with national security, fighting terrorism, and catching criminals. Their mission is to distort public opinion and spread propaganda in order to generate a ‘consensus reality’ – and they are responsible for polluting the internet with much of the garbage in comment sections, Facebook groups, forums and bogus blog posts.

They jump into productive online discussions and civil debates, and undermine them, ruin them, with uninvited insulting, racist and inflammatory comments. If only it stopped there.

The secretive GCHQ and JTRIG training manual which was leaked via Glenn Greenwald and Ed Snowden show an even dirtier side to our governments’ new ‘digital Stasi’. Their report means that the public can finally put an ugly face on this disease which is ruining the internet. First Look explains:

“Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.”

The cat is out of the bag…

Where do trolls come from?

We’ve been victims of this going back as far as 1997 when a police agent hired to sabotage the Critical Mass bicycle ride in San Francisco launched a smear campaign against me for exposing the elaborate plot and her role in it. I sued her and won a $5,000 judgement which was overturned by a corrupt San Francisco judge who literally dozed off during the trial.

We also reported about this when the US Army Corps of Engineers got on the web after the federal levee failures in 2005 (Katrina) that killed over 1,000 people, rendered over 100,000 homeless and caused $100 billion in financial losses.

Corps computers were used to post insulting, racist and inflammatory remarks and disrupt any forum – anywhere in the world – where people were asking about the Corps role in the catastrophe. Nola.com owned by the New Orleans Picayune has all the data on the posts to its site and not only will not release it but fired the employee who collected the data and was about to turn it over to investigators.

For Israel’s PR war on Gaza, it may be all downhill from here
Despite the sympathy of world leaders and the Twitter and YouTube wizardry of Israeli spokespeople, history teaches that the continuation of the Gaza campaign will inevitably lead to increasing criticism and condemnation.